The word ‘Peace’ is written on one of the containers preventing access to Venezuela from Colombia.
Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

The government of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro has announced that it will hold its own huge concert to rival one being organised by billionaire British businessman Richard Branson, a backer of the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó.

The information minister, Jorge Rodriguez, said the government would throw a concert on Saturday and Sunday on Venezuela’s side of the border opposite one in Colombia organised by Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Branson said on Monday that he hopes the concert he is throwing will save lives by raising money for “much-needed medical help” for crisis-torn Venezuela, which is suffering from hyperinflation and widespread shortages of food and medicine.

Branson said he hoped to raise $100m for suffering Venezuelans and open the country’s borders to emergency aid. Up to 300,000 people were expected to attend Friday’s concert featuring Spanish-French singer Manu Chao, Mexican band Maná, Spanish singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz and Dominican artist Juan Luis Guerra.

Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd, criticised the Branson concert on Tuesday, calling the event a US-backed effort to tarnish the socialist government.

“It has nothing to do with humanitarian aid at all,” the 75-year old Waters said in a video statement. “It has to do with Richard Branson ... having bought the US saying, ‘We have decided to take over Venezuela, for whatever our reasons may be.’”

But Branson said that it was not funded by any government and that all the artists were performing for free. The plan was to raise donations from viewers watching the concert on a livestream over the internet.

“Venezuela sadly has not become the utopia that the current administration of Venezuela or the past administration were hoping for, and that has resulted in a lot of people literally dying from lack of medical help,” Branson told AP in a telephone interview from Necker, his private island in the British Virgin Islands. “I think it will draw attention to the problem on a global basis.”

The concert is being held in Cúcuta, a city of some 700,000 people that has been swollen by hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled hardships in their homeland. Branson said he opposes trying to carry the aid in by force, but clearly favours Guaidó in his standoff with Maduro.

Maduro has vowed to prevent the US aid entering Venezuela, and he announced on state television on Monday evening that his government would import 300 tonnes of aid from Russia that he said would arrive soon.

Maduro is holding on to power with the backing of the military and powerful allies such as Russia in a conflict with increasingly cold war-like dimensions. Guaidó, meanwhile, is relying on the support of the international community, including the US, and powerful cultural allies, like Branson.

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Guaidó, who heads Venezuela’s opposition-controlled congress, declared himself interim president on 23 January with the backing of the US and most South American and European nations, which argue that Maduro’s re-election last May was fraudulent. Guaidó has announced that humanitarian aid will enter Venezuela on Saturday, the day after Branson’s concert.

Branson said the initiative follows his involvement with Live Aid and years of work with the Elders, a group of elder statesmen and political leaders that he helped establish to avoid conflict and assist in humanitarian situations.

Guaidó said the move by Maduro’s government to put on a rival concert was “desperate”.

“They’re debating whether the aid should come in or not ... They don’t know what to do,” Guaido said Monday. “They’re now making up a concert. How many concerts are they going to stage?”